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Edward Cahill, Steven C. Bullock. Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 212–213, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.212
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Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America is a learned, lucidly written, and well-researched series of character studies held together by broad themes of imperial leadership and colonial self-representation. Despite its rather misleading title, the bulk of the book concerns not so much “the politics of politeness” as the politeness of politics—or rather the function of politeness, broadly defined, within eighteenth-century Anglo-American politics. Scholars such as Richard Bushman, Cary Carson, C. Dallett Hemphill, and David S. Shields have written extensively about early American material cultures of politeness, elaborating how traditions of refined consumption and comportment symbolized elite virtue, constructed social authority, and policed the boundaries of rank and status. But Steven C. Bullock’s conception of politeness derives more from the work of Lawrence E. Klein, who describes the eighteenth-century development of a Whig discourse of refinement, moderation, and wit as a bloodless and more effective political alternative to the absolutism and violence that had defined the previous century (Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England [1994]). Bullock’s chief contribution is to locate this discourse of polite politics within a British American colonial framework, showing how it not only bolstered the authority of provincial leaders with their partners and adversaries but provided them with a significant means of opposing harsh and arbitrary governance.
